


pray to stay

by halfwheeze



Series: come home safe [1]
Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: M/M, POV Outsider, the demon girl fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-24
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2019-01-04 18:14:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12174105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halfwheeze/pseuds/halfwheeze
Summary: Prompt! Okay, imagine this: Shane and Ryan are investigating a house infested with demons, right? And the demons are like 'damn aren't they just cuter than a kitten in a basket?' So they start to purposefully scare Ryan in order to give him and Shane a proper push in the right direction!





	pray to stay

**Author's Note:**

> tell me if i fucked up lmao

The walls shiver with anticipation. The creaks ring across the floorboards and onto the porch, scaring the smaller one. She doesn’t have lips anymore, but the entity in the house grins, just because she knows how the emotion should feel. The smaller one should be fun to break, she thinks, as she can smell the fear coming off of him in waves. The bigger one is already attempting to laugh off her efforts, but she can see how his brows crease, how his shoulders stiffen ever so slightly; he worries after the smaller one. Well, isn’t that cute.

“I already hate this,” the smaller one whines, and the bigger one laughs. It’s a genuine, booming thing, and the house can tell that he enjoys the smaller one’s whining, if not his anxieties. She wonders if he loves him, but it’s not her job to know. She thinks he does anyway.

“Come on, Ryan, we haven’t even gotten in yet - you can do this, bud,” he says, opening her doors for the smaller one - Ryan - and putting a hand on the small of his back to push him on in. She grins again, sending a knock throughout the entry way. Ryan jumps, and he’s such an easily spooked little thing. What a joy, what a cute little thing. The bigger one’s hand hasn’t moved from his back.

“It’s just the house settling, Ryan,” not-Ryan says, pushing Ryan along into the next room.

“Shut up, Shane,” Ryan grouches, walking ever so slightly faster and out of Shane’s grip. He doesn’t see Shane’s face fall. Their camera men follow, but they already hold less interest for the entity. The two boys were just so cute, and she follows them with her focus instead of anyone else. She sends a ripple throughout the infrastructure, the creaks spooking Ryan again. Maybe, just maybe, this could be more fun than scaring them away from her. It’s not as if they’ll stay forever anyway. They never do.

“What the fuck?” Ryan says quietly, but with feeling. Shane has a hand halfway between his own body and Ryan’s, reaching out as if to comfort. She wonders just how easy it will be, to throw them together.

“It’s just the house,” Shane tries to assuage again. The other rolls his eyes and sighs through his nose.

“Of course it’s the fucking house, the fucking house demon,” Ryan replies, sitting down on the couch and looking around the room. “Let’s just get into this.”

He tells her story in a measured voice, much different from his reactionary freaking out of only a few moments ago. He sounds like he knows what he’s talking about, and she files away his assurance of knowledge, wondering if it can come in handy later.

After the story, they wander around the three stories of her house, lingering in each room for Ryan to tell little tidbits about it. Shane listens and provides humorous commentary, of which Ryan snips back, and they laugh a lot. No one has laughed so much in her house in centuries. It’s not as if they’ll stay forever. They never do.

She uses some of her force to push the ottoman at the top of the stairs down them, and Ryan actually screams. Shane curls a hand around his hip and neither of them notice, too absorbed in arguing about the origin of the fall. While they’re busy, she sets about doing something else in the house. A painting falls in the bathroom and they run again, this time loosely holding hands. She smiles down at them and waits for them to notice. They don’t. She slams a cupboard in the kitchen.

“What the fuck is happening?” Ryan enunciates every syllable, holding onto Shane’s hand tighter now. It’s only now, when it almost hurts, that Shane looks down. He unravels their hands and instead laces their fingers together, just moving on while Ryan is stuck staring. That night, they sleep close together, whispering. Their camera crew is gone, left them to spend the night elsewhere. She sees them exchange a few hesitant kisses and knows she cannot give them any more evidence. It’s not as if they’ll stay forever. They never do.

She feels a pull nearly so soon as her new boys leave, and she naively assumes it might be to follow them, so she goes. Instead of the softness of Shane and Ryan, she meets a harsh, white light, and she’s very confused. A person, constantly changing form, is there to greet her, and though she can’t pick out any particular features, she knows that the other entity is smiling, so she feels slightly at ease. The smiling light tells her that she has done a great deed, that she is freed from her position as a demon, and that she may choose how to live out her next life: forever unto heaven, or to be born again. Another forever tied to one place sounds hellish, so she says goodbye to her memories of Shane and Ryan, and she descends unto the earth.

Adira is born with her memories intact, an infant with centuries worth of history to understand. Even with bouncing from home to home, she is an intelligent child, quiet, the kind people should want to adopt within the moment of meeting her. But, she puts people off, the cognizance behind her eyes, the age, they know she is not normal,  they just don’t know quite what’s wrong. Adira doesn’t mind. No one feels right anyway. So she waits, and she learns languages while her neuroplasticity is still strong, and she moves on. She’s a strange child, but that’s okay.

A familiar voice rings across the adoption home one day in the middle of October while Adira is working on her Hebrew and swimming in a sweater. Though she never does, she bounds down the stairs to see who it is, hoping against hope that the voice has stayed the same over time. When she gets to the bottom of the stairs, Ryan Bergara and Shane Madej, though looking a few years older, are standing in the doorway. She has to act normal for the next fifteen minutes, and maybe they’ll want her. Maybe they’ll feel right.

“Hi there. I’m Ryan. What’s your name?” Ryan asks, his voice soft and delicately hesitant, like he’s trying to act just as scared as he expects her to be. He does not know that he is not a stranger to her, and her heart swells with his care. Adira counts quickly to fourteen, her favorite number, before flashing a child’s grin and walking a little further down the stairs.

“I’m Adira! Who is that?” she gives him back a question, pointing to Shane as if she doesn’t remember him as if it was yesterday. Shane smiles down at her, because even when she has two steps left, he’s still two feet taller than her, and he waves before speaking. He’s still as awkward as she remembers, even if it’s been very nearly six years. He bends a little at the knees to speak.

“I’m Shane - how old are you, Adira?” he asks, his voice low among the noise of the house, but she can still hear him. The other kids in the home aren’t paying Ryan and Shane any mind, not knowing their significance, only that they were more adults to avoid. Lots of kids in the home had unfortunate histories with men, so she didn’t blame them for their mistrust of her boys.

“I turn six at the end of the month - on Halloween,” she enunciates every syllable as she knows children do, even if it’s never been something she does personally. The woman who leads the house looks at her strangely, but overall lets it pass; she probably accounts for it as nervousness. Adira sits down on the stairs, smoothing her skirt and looking up toward the two men. It takes one and a half seconds of staring for Ryan to sit down beside her, and Shane just steps forward, leaning on the banister. They already feel right. She wants them to be right.

“Really? Ryan loves spooky things. Do you like your birthday being Halloween?” Shane tells her, looking at her with a fondness that makes her feel like she could be young again. She barely knows what that means, hasn’t known what that meant for centuries. Wars have passed since she felt young.

“I mean, it’s cool. Lots of candy, ghosts, that kinda thing,” she says, her hands picking at her skirt. She’s not making a lot of direct eye contact, given that most people find it unsettling, but the conversation passes well. They ask her about what she’s learning, and are delighted with her answers of languages, and they seem to really be impressed rather than freaked out. They feel right.

Adoption is not an easy process, especially for same sex parents, but now that she knows Ryan and Shane are around, months pass like moments, liquid in the well of the rest of her life. She gets to be around them again, her boys that aren’t boys anymore, and even though she’ll never be able to tell them, it’s good enough that they’re around, She’s glad to have found them again. Everything feels alright.

**Author's Note:**

> hmu on the tumblr with the prompts lmao


End file.
